toi

"The Iliad" by Homer, "The Collector" by John Fowles, "The Magic Mountain" and "Death in Venice" by Thomas Mann, "The Great Gatsby" by Fitzgerald, nearly every main character in the films of Woody Allen and Hayao Miyazaki, the songs of The Beatles and Van Morrison—all these works of art, to varying degrees, depict one person's obsession with another.

This fixation can take different forms: active and cruel, as in Fowles' The Collector, or romantic and accepting, as in Shakespeare's sonnets. The main question is how this feeling manifests and what it drives both the bearer and the object to do: does it spark sublimation into art, provide motivation and a zest for life, or lead to suffering?